Our board game club had a meeting yesterday. Lots of games were played, which was good.

I started the afternoon with Web of Power. It’s one of my favourites, but I haven’t played it often this year. I should, I should… The game was rather exciting in the end. My score depended a lot from advisors and I needed to get one in Schwaben to score a lot. The problem was I also needed to get a cloister in Schwaben to play an advisor. Getting that Schwaben card was the tricky bit. In my last turn I did get it and played a move worth approximately 15-20 points. How very satisfying. Unfortunately, even though I darted from the last place to the very top, I couldn’t beat Robert who had amassed lots of points from both cloisters and advisors. Still, the game was very good, full of excitement.

Then we tried Canyon, which was a total Robert-fest. He made correct predictions turn after turn, winning the game easily. I didn’t do that good and was last. Canyon is an interesting game… the trick-taking bit of it is very plain and almost boring, but the score board game makes it better. However, there are better trick-taking games, especially from a gamer’s point of view.

Next we played Crokinole , which proved to be a good idea. Two four-player games went quickly. I was told the board was faster than last time, which is good because I did wax it last week. I was curious if it did anything, but it seems it worked.

While we were waiting for other table of gamers to finish, we played a game Jari had devised. The rules (in Finnish) can be found in his blog. It’s basically a negative-sum game, where everybody loses. Each player has five points to use each round and five point reserve (your right hand fingers and your left hand fingers) that can be used to fill your use points. It was interesting experiment, but the game needs more development.

Then it was time for the main event (at least for me), Funkenschlag. Warnings of three hour length and theme of power economics did scare some away, but I got three victims to try the game with me. It was a blast. First of all — my three hour game end trigger wasn’t needed. The game took just two hours to finish. I think we did a good job on multi-tasking in the resource shopping and building phases. We didn’t remove the lowest power plants each turn in the second step and that seemed to work well as written in the rules.

The game itself was rather entertaining. It feels very much like a merciful version of Age of Steam. At least you’ll have some income each turn. Our game was pretty close. Ville reached 20 cities, me and Jarno had 17 and Juha got 16… I think Juha and Jarno were in the lead after step one. Everybody seemed to enjoy the game and I’m quite glad I took the effort to create the better map before I tried it. Only problem was that blue and black were a bit difficult to tell apart. That was pretty minor issue.

Players reorganized and I was left alone with Ville. Fortunately I had brought Ta Yü with me. It was fun, even though Ville won me 70-54. The tiles are so pretty I don’t care about the results. We also played two two-player games of Crokinole, which went 1-1.

My last game was another new trick-taking game, Gargon. It’s higher on the weirdness scale, oddest aspect of it being probably the fact that you can see card suits from their backsides. There was a problem though — the red and the purple cards were really difficult to tell apart in the poor light we played in. That’s more than a minor annoyance. Still, it was great fun, I enjoyed the game and I think I grasped some tactics as well. At least I was able to share the victory with Ville. We had 80 points, Robert got 61 and Atro 50, so we were doing something right there…

And that’s it. Next big game event is next weekend, HelCon II which should be a blast!